


The Erin Book

by amtrak12



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: F/F, First Kiss, Forgiveness, Healing, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2016-08-20
Packaged: 2018-08-09 20:53:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7816849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amtrak12/pseuds/amtrak12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abby kept a notebook for all of her Erin-related thoughts during their rift. Erin finds it as they're moving into the new headquarters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Erin Book

**Author's Note:**

> This is a trope right? istg this is some kind of trope, but it's such a useful trope so whatever.
> 
> Special thanks to cassiopeiasara for checking this over for me first and pointing out my trouble spots! :D If they're still trouble, it's my fault. I edited while sleepy.

Erin grimaced as she lifted another box on top of the bed to unpack. "Ooph. How did I get stuck with all the heavy boxes?"

"Uh, you didn't," Abby said, trying to hang a bulletin board on the wall. "If you had really been stuck with the heavy boxes, you would be unpacking that one right now." She pointed towards a standard sized plastic storage crate that sat in the hallway.

Erin took a guess. "Is it your energy crystals collection?"

"Yes." Abby looked sheepish but also secretly proud, and Erin had to grin at how much was still the same. They had been out of each other's lives for so long (too long), but ever since Aldridge Mansion and founding the Ghostbusters, it was like time hadn't changed a thing. Abby was still Abby: unafraid, confident, practical if sometimes overlooking the details, stubborn in all the right ways. Gosh, Erin had missed her.

"I can't believe you still have those." She picked up the box cutter to slice through the tape. "Some of them were just rocks we found in cemeteries."

"Awesome looking rocks," Abby corrected. "Ooo, remember the one that looked like a duck?"

From sophomore year of college when they visited the site of the old Mercywood Hospital, yes she remembered. "You still have that one too?"

Abby scrunched up her nose. "Except the beak chipped off. Now, it just looks like a ladle."

Erin laughed and pulled up the flaps of her box. It was filled with books. What a surprise.

"Hey, are we keeping all of our books separate or were we putting everything in Patty's library?"

"Is it Patty's library?" Abby asked. "I thought it was a general library."

"I don't know," Erin said. "She fought Holtzmann pretty hard for the room."

"Good point. We'll check with her later." Abby gestured towards the space between the foot of the bed and the wall. "I guess just put them on the floor for now."

Erin sighed at the heavy box of books. So, she should ask before moving the box next time. Noted.

She hefted the box and carried it to the end of the bed before letting it drop to the floor. Then, she sat down beside it and started to unpack. It might have been more efficient to leave the books in the box until they knew where the books were going, but Abby hated leaving boxes lying around. She wanted everything unpacked right away or she would feel unsettled.

(Erin didn't like living out of boxes, either, but she preferred to know exactly where each item was going to go before she unpacked it. Otherwise, she would just be moving things twice -- or three times or four -- and it became frustrating.) (They had had some... interesting moving experiences in college until they'd finally worked out a system.)

Book after book, Erin pulled out and stacked on the floor. She had no way to organize them for Abby, but she could at least make the piles stable and balanced so they didn't topple over at every slight movement. It was a little surprising how many of the titles she recognized: Torbin's Spirit Guide; Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life; Fairy Paths and Spirit Roads. There were also quite a few she didn't recognize, of course, but the well worn copy of Sacred Geometry? Oh yes, she knew that one. She'd poured over the pages with Abby on countless occasions. Her handwriting was still certain to be in the margins.

A few notebooks were crammed into this box as well. One of them fought with Erin as she tried to remove it. Its spiral bound edge had hooked itself into the spine of a supernatural creatures encyclopedia.

Finally, she got it free. It looked like one of Abby's old class notebooks from college. The X-Files logo was drawn in sharpie on the front, and the green cover was flecked with white where the color had been scuffed off. Erin quirked a smile. Leave it to Abby to keep their old research too.

She opened the notebook, expecting to see enthusiastic notes and calculations and lists of sources to track down later. She was partially right.

The first few pages were indeed filled with notes and calculations -- though, not all of it paranormal related, much to Erin's amusement. Two pages were notes from what appeared to be a thermodynamics class dated September 1994. It didn't seem like Abby had consistently used this notebook. The notes were disjointed and scattered over several topics, and one of the pages actually contained a personal review of an X-Files episode that Erin knew hadn't aired until 1997. 

The next page held scribbles.

Dark, heavy lined scribbles in varying intensities across the page. It was like someone had kept writing and crossing out the words in different, angry bursts.

Erin couldn't make out any of the words beneath the scribbled ink, only glimpses of a letter here and there, but there were some remarks that hadn't been crossed out at all. Words written at angles that ignored the ruled lines of the notebook sheets.

_17 times!!!_

_no show. did not show at all_

_ Goddammit Erin _

_WHY  
WHY ERIN??!_

Erin's heart pounded as she turned the page.

_Okay you know what? Screw her! If she wants to turn her back on everything and throw away all of our work, then fine. Who needs her? I don't. I'll do this on my own. I have lab space. I'll keep investigating and I'll get those plans for a spectral energy reader working. And then when I find proof of ghosts and spirits and the barrier and suddenly she wants back in, I'll tell her to buzz off. TOO LATE ERIN. Maybe I'll hit her while I'm at it. Ha!_

Down at the bottom of the page:

_This is ridiculous. She has to just be confused. I'll bring her around._

The next page had been ripped out. Echoes of hard drawn scribbles were still indented on the page beneath where it had been.

Oh no.

Erin's shoulders were tight. Her chest hurt and she could hardly feel the notebook in her hands.

Oh no.

The notes continued. Never dated, so Erin had no bearing for how much time passed between each thought Abby had recorded. Some were furious, some were hurt. Some were exasperated as Abby complained about a solution that was eluding her that she was certain Erin would have been able to find.

Oh no... this was... this....

"Hey what did you find?" Abby said suddenly so cheerful -- no, still so cheerful. These were different Abbys she was looking at between the notebook and the room.

Abby crossed over and leaned over the edge of the bed to look down at Erin. "Is that our old research?"

Erin shook her head, unable to say anything else.

"Then, which one is it?" Abby pushed the notebook's cover up off Erin's leg to check. Her voice shrank to something small. "Oh. Erin, put that one back."

Erin flipped to the next page.

"Erin, put it down, you shouldn't be reading that."

"It's about me." Erin looked up at Abby to challenge her, but she couldn't push aside her guilt and anguish enough to quite pull it off. "I should read it."

"No, you shouldn't." Abby shook her head. "It was written forever ago. That stuff's ancient history."

Erin ignored her and flipped to the next page. This entry was Abby doubting herself for sticking with the paranormal investigations. Abby never doubted herself, ever. Especially not when it came to investigating the paranormal. That was always Erin's specialty. She'd done this to her.

"Erin!"

"Abby!" She pulled the notebook back when Abby lunged for it. Abby stared at her with pleading eyes, but Erin held firm. 

"It's from when I left you," she said.

"Yeah, and I wrote all of that when I was still really angry," Abby said. "But you're back now; we're okay. We found ghosts. We saved the whole flipping city. Everything's fine now."

"I just need to know," Erin said. These were all the words she hadn't heard, all the fights they hadn't had, because Erin had cut Abby out of her life so thoroughly. There'd only been that one fight about it, that one confrontation when Abby had shown up at her apartment to try to talk her off the ledge, and Erin had been so closed off it hadn't even been much of a fight.

(Abby had argued and pleaded and tossed out every good thing they’d accomplished together, every step towards discovery they’d made, but Erin had stayed distant and cold. She hadn’t shouted back once.

After Abby had finally left, fuming over how Erin hadn’t seemed to care, Erin had told herself it was okay. She was merely being rational where Abby refused to be. She was rational for stopping the book from being published, she was rational for dropping their research now because searching for ghosts was so completely irrational, it crossed into the realm of insanity.... When in reality, it had been a pathetically weak attempt to pretend she wasn't simply terrified.)

She swallowed against the lump in her throat. "I just need to see, Abby."

Abby's shoulders slumped and she breathed out 'Erin' in a sigh, but she didn't move to take the notebook away. Erin took a steadying breath and refocused.

Messages of doubt continued, but they were cycled with messages of gloating and celebration whenever Abby got a glimpse of something substantial. A blip on an EVP. Unexplainable heat signatures in an abandoned warehouse. Smoothing out a particularly gnarled equation and suddenly realizing how to measure psychokinetic energy.

Surprisingly, the first (and only?) mention of teaming up with Holtzmann came written with regrets about how Erin wasn't there to celebrate finally turning their theories into practical inventions. Though, that wasn't nearly as surprising as what Erin saw next.

_Gauge bosons in a five-dimensional theory with localized gravity_

Erin blinked. She knew that title. This was her paper she'd published. Admittedly, she'd published a lot of papers through her career as a "normal" theoretical physicist, but this particular paper she remembered vividly. It had stirred up quite a bit of drama at the time of publication. Someone from CalTech had written a scathing rebuttal to her conclusions -- not because any of her claims were unfounded or too outlandish, but simply because her coauthor was a rival and this man wanted to rip him apart.

Unfortunately, it had meant Erin had been ripped apart as well. It had been her paper after all; she was lead author. The work was largely hers. A few physicists had written to her in support, a few others had openly criticized the CalTech physicist for passing personal rivalries off as legitimate science, but there had been no large swell in her defense. No rebuttals to his rebuttal were published, no extra speaking engagements were offered to her out of sympathy. Even her boss Dr. Filmore had merely suggested she choose her co-authors more wisely next time.

It wasn't a fond memory.

But Abby hadn't written about the rebuttal or the drama in the notebook. She'd written about Erin's work. She'd praised it and pulled some of the data out in order to push it one step further. She'd drawn up diagrams and equations to show how Erin's conclusions offered further support of the barrier they'd theorized existed between the spirit plane and the physical plane.

(Erin would have never admitted it back then, but she'd made the same realization about the barrier.)

"You read my paper."

"Which one?" Abby asked softly. She leaned only a couple inches over the edge of the bed like she was worried about invading Erin's space even though Erin was still sitting on the floor.

"The one that got me called a delusional hack and a prime example of how anyone can claim to have a PhD if they pay a university enough money."

"Ugh, that one." Abby's eyes became shaded by a determined kind of anger, the kind of anger Erin had just seen days before in a ghost-infested Times Square. "I wrote a rebuttal to that shitweed ripping his own work to shreds."

Erin stared. "You did?"

Abby dropped her gaze to the corner of the mattress. "Never got it published obviously. I figured a paranormal investigator defending you wouldn't have helped anything."

It would have helped _me_ , she wanted to say. But she knew Abby was right. Her peers would have used Abby's career to take Erin down further, and Erin would have been furious instead of grateful like she should have been, like she was now after seeing these notes.

She'd cared so much about her reputation for so many years. It seemed so overwhelmingly hollow now.

"I read all of your papers, you know," Abby said.

Erin refocused on her. She felt her throat growing tighter.

"I wanted to see what you were up to. Had to keep tabs on you," Abby weakly joked. She met Erin's eyes again and pushed out a shaky smile. "You were always being brilliant. Kicking butt and taking those other physicists' names."

Erin inhaled sharply. Tears pooled in her eyes just enough to blur her vision but not quite fall.

_Abby._

Her best friend in the entire world, the person she had hurt so deeply for no other reason than Erin had been scared. Scared of being proven wrong instead of right. Scared of never finding any proof at all. Scared of the looks people gave her when she talked about what she loved and what she knew. Scared it meant no one would ever believe her even if she did find proof someday. And on top of that, she'd let herself be scared. She'd let her fears become more important to her than her friendship with Abby, and then, she'd turned her back on her.

Yet, Abby, in turn, had never completely abandoned her. Oh, she had been angry and hurt, and Erin was still certain Abby had hated her, at least some of the time, but she'd never given up. She'd never decided Erin just wasn't worth her time or energy at all. She'd still _cared_.

Erin ducked her head as the first couple of tears slipped off her eyelashes.

"Erin." Abby's voice broke. She moved off the bed to go over to her, but Erin was already pushing herself up off the floor. They met in the middle, both now standing.

"I'm sorry." Erin wiped at the tears that had slipped out.

"It's okay." Abby rubbed Erin's arms. "Everything is okay."

Abby pulled her into a hug. Erin wrapped her arms around her and closed her eyes. This was her best friend -- her _best friend_ \-- how had she lived without her for so long?

Erin dug her fingers into Abby's cardigan. Ducked her head to slot better against Abby's shoulder.

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay." Abby pulled away and brought her hands up to cup Erin's face. She smiled. "We're all good, Ghost Girl."

Abby's hands were warm against her neck. Her fingers rested against skin, and her thumbs rubbed over Erin's cheeks as she continued to smile up at her. The tight ache in Erin's chest began to uncoil. It felt so _nice_ being her with Abby. It felt nice to be talking to her again, to be hunting ghosts with her again, to even be rooming with her again. They were a team: a currently unstoppable team who had just traveled to a literal hell and back and lived to tell the tale.

And maybe there was some lingering adrenaline from that trip into the portal or maybe there'd been too many emotions churned up by the notebook or maybe they were simply standing too close together still, but Erin found herself leaning forward without any conscious thought.

She kissed Abby.

Pressed her lips against Abby's once... twice... before her brain caught up to herself, and she pulled back.

"I'm sorry." Oh no, oh god. "I shouldn't have done that, I'm sorry." Erin wiped at some lingering tears in her eyes. She could blame it on them, right, the tears? And Abby wouldn't get ma--

Abby's hands tugged her down again.

Strangely, Erin's first thought after being kissed by her best friend was indignation over how she was suddenly the tall one in this kind of scenario. It felt... odd. But then the indignation and oddness gave way to the heart-pounding reality of Abby kissing her.

Abby was kissing her.

Their lips dragged over each other, again and again. Everything felt so warm and soft and-- and-- some other sensation Erin couldn't name, because she couldn't think. Well, she could. She was still aware of everything: aware of Abby's breath against her face, of the knitted texture of her cardigan, of how she was clutching that cardigan a little too tightly and should probably actually _do_ something with her hands. But while she was aware, it was like she couldn't push herself to make any kind of conscious effort.

And kissing Abby felt really, really nice, so why even bother thinking about something else?

"Hey, do any of you -- oh! Whoa!"

Erin startled, and both she and Abby pulled back from each other (though Abby, Erin noticed, merely dropped her hand to Erin's hip like she wanted to make sure she still stayed there). Erin pressed her lips together and risked a glance towards the door.

Patty stood in the doorway gaping at them. Erin wasn't sure where Patty ranked on the list of people who could have caught them, but she knew her cheeks were burning with embarrassment all the same.

"Oh, okay," Patty said, still looking stunned. "So that's a thing y'all are doing. Okay, that's cool. I'm just gonna go." She pointed off down the hall. "Cause I've got my own kind of... boxes and things. That I'm just gonna go do. Yeah."

Patty turned and disappeared back the way she'd came. Abby shouted after her.

"Yeah, how about you knock next time?"

"Close the damn door next time," Patty yelled back. Erin winced. The embarrassment and adrenaline still warred within her.

"Hey." Abby tugged on her hip.

Erin forced open her eyes and looked over at Abby. A smile she couldn't even begin to fight crept out the moment their eyes met.

"So," she said. "This new place comes with roommates."

An answering smile spread across Abby's face. "Yeah," she giggled. "Kind of forgot about that."

"Yeah," Erin nodded, still smiling. A giddy laugh escaped her, and then they were both dissolving into giggling mess.

"Oh my gosh." Erin leaned forward to rest her head on Abby's shoulder again, still laughing. Abby immediately tucked her face into the crook of Erin's neck, and okay, wow, did that twist something in Erin's chest.

They both calmed down. Erin moved her hands to Abby's waist. It felt like she was breaking some kind of rule governing touches and personal space, but they had just been kissing. A lot. Erin was pretty sure existing rules got thrown out the window after that.

Maybe. Maybe not. Oh, there was a lot things that needed to be sorted out, processed, a lot of questions circling the edge of her thoughts that she would have to answer later. (What is this? Were these feelings always there? Please say this was new for both of them. Don't let her be the only one who hadn't known.)

But processing could be for later. Right now, she just wanted to keep existing in this exact moment.

She pulled back just enough to look at Abby. "Hi."

"Hello," Abby said in a purposefully pitched voice that made both of them chuckle. Erin flexed her hands against Abby's waist. Abby's hands fluttered back and forth over Erin's shoulders like she was uncertain about the new touching rules too.

Erin looked back into her eyes. "Hi."

Abby tugged at her collar. "You said that already."

"Yeah. I did." Erin smiled. Then, she leaned forward and kissed her again.

**Author's Note:**

> feel free to find me on tumblr @ amtrak12 :)


End file.
